I thought about David Foster Wallace today in the aftermath of taking the cat to the vet's and receiving a confirmation of some not so great news about her. The blurb about the Pulitzer Prize committee's failure to come to a winner for this year's fiction prize, in which The Pale King was of three finalists, one would expect it to catch your eye. Walking home with groceries on a warm Thursday night, yes, you think of such things. Maybe, "what good would winning the Pulitzer do him anyway?" one thought. Or, "kind of weirdly appropriate, given his subject of great bureaucracy and offices (not to suggest that the Pulitzer Committee is in any way inhuman), such that he would maybe have gotten a chuckle out of it."

Groceries home, then a nap, then clanking around some dishes in a tub of soapy water (which reminds me of helping my mother move once), work week behind me, a turkey meatloaf in the oven, I feel a need to take out the old piece of scrap paper and do some scribbling. Now, The Pale King, here's a book devoted to all those thoughts that writers have but don't, because of jobs and obligations, get to put down on paper. He seems sensitive to that fate. He knew that world. And, fortunately, he occupied a place where he eventually was able to write, write a lot, write well, and then finally produce this great homage, an homage particular to all that which goes unsaid, and thus, when I think about it, a great service, a great kindness to writers everywhere. Seriously.

Well, no one likes to whine. We all have jobs. We all face the huge impersonal forces. We all have to make good choices. And so I ask myself, now, what am I trying to say? "A writer, you say you are; well, who says? what gives you the right? who died and left you 'writer?' why is the fact that you apparently have the notion that you took a thought out of your head and put it on paper have any even the slightest importance, let alone the thought itself? What makes you think you should be treated kindly, that pretty girls should have been more flirtatious in fun ways, that your college professors should have been more solicitous?! Not how the game is played, my friend. Just because 'you are a writer'... yeah, right. Pay the rent, do your job, try at least to be a member of society, not just navel staring all the time."

I find myself in agreement. If you are wise enough to have something to write, you know that you occupy no special deserving seat of privilege, even if you might once have thought. Indeed, there is pride in the jobs we do for a living. And all that time spent away from the notebook, I have to think it makes a single thought or impression or small poetic something all the sweeter. It all goes to be part of that floating sea of consciousness that you would have to be a Joyce to rein in. It all makes what we do get to write all the richer, and sometimes we pay a little homage here and there to all the lost thoughts and works, as perhaps Lincoln himself is doing in his letter to the mother grieving for lost sons, about 'the solemn pride of laying so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom,' a phrase which might have a certain deeply satisfying grandeur for the obscure of us. Indeed the attitude of the great Mid Westerner fairly stares us in the face, the recognition that, of course, 'the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here...' A real writer, one might argue, disdains "PR," both of the personal kind and the popular kind, as it would skew and render false the real human condition, the real human condition including the fact that some people just seem to take to disliking one another.

Mr. Wallace has provided a fine and moving memorial to all of us would-be writers, all us 'worthless scumbags,' all of us who fell for its tasks direct and indirect, all of us who will of course never win great prizes. I should think that would be enough.